[mortenjorck]

Is there a reason why time-of-use systems can’t have a customer-defined price limit, beyond which they opt into a blackout? The sense I got from the stories of people suddenly facing five-figure power bills is that most would have gladly spent a night or two with propane and candles rather than cleaning out their savings.

[sokoloff]

There's no fundamental technical reason. It costs money to install the smart meters. It would cost more money to install control systems and automatic transfer switches, but even the smallest generator-backed (or multi-feed) datacenter has all the equipment technically needed to implement what you describe. Many large UPS units have everything as well.

It's probably an additional $3-6K on top of the smart meter to build in such switching (an ATS and a control system to understand the current/projected rate and switch based on it). For this event, going down to your main panel and flipping the main breaker for a few days would have accomplished the same thing for no cost.

I suspect the same people who bought Griddy's save money almost all the time plan are not the ones likely to install $5K of extra switching equipment at their house to protect themselves from a multi-day deep freeze event in Texas. Certainly no landlord is going to install that where they bear the costs and maintenance so their tenants can buy cheaper electricity.

[cpwright]

The smart meter can already be disabled remotely. I have one in NY that will alternate between its reading and "CLOSED" meaning that the circuit is connected. As a parent poster pointed out, the power company, however, cannot disconnect you without proper notice.

[ArkanExplorer]

Every second appliance has Wifi nowadays - but we need an industry standard that allows consumers to control usage based on price, perhaps by assigning specific appliances in your house to your energy retailer web account, and then allowing the retailer/grid operator to control when they are turned off and on (or to adjust their energy intensity) in return for a monthly discount.

For example just by heating and cooling houses a few hours before people get home, we can shift a lot of demand towards the middle of the day when solar power is abundant, and away from evening peaks.

We're definitely going to need something like this for widespread EV usage, where cars can potentially upload power to the grid.

Government has a role here in setting standards. They are the ones who get blamed for high energy prices or outages, anyway.

[rfdave]

That's awesome. Now I have to buy all new appliances, with poorly implemented WiFi stacks, trash all my older, fully functional appliances (Oh, how environmentally friendly will that be?) to let my local power company save me $20/month. Sounds like a fantastic deal.

[htrp]

http://www.thinkecoinc.com/

These guys used to do this in NYC.... would let ConEd turn off your AC in the middle of the summer

(Under the hood it's an IOT zigbee hub)

[sokoloff]

They're not grid-reactive, but for $20 you can get a programmable T-stat already. That's a huge part of the peak demand in cooling-dominated climates. (Heating demand peaks tend to hit overnight, of course.)

[xur17]

Or, is there a way for these customer facing companies to hedge against this risk via options, and utilize this to set a price cap (passing on a small monthly fee to the customer)?

[astanway]

Yep - this is what 99% of electricity retailers do.

[Spivak]

Which is why Griddy exists in the first place. Those financial instruments aren't free and add a cost to the service.

I think the right regulatory approach this case would be to require the purchaser to manage their risk so that you can shop around like we do with other insurances. So if you go with a retail electric company you don't have to worry since you're not the purchaser.

[xur17]

But most electricity retailers just set a fixed price for electricity completely disconnected from the actual costs. I'm specifically wondering if it's possible to allow for wholesale purchasing, but set a cap at something like $10 or $100/kwhr - still crazy high, but keeping obscene rates away. Maybe let the customer choose what level of cap they want.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Texas's rates were capped at $9/kwhr, so "$10 or $100/kwhr" certainly wouldn't keep the obscene rates away.

[tedunangst]

Why would anyone agree to sell you power at cost, unless the cost goes too high, and then sell it below cost?

[xur17]

Because in addition to receiving their at cost payment, they'd also receive a fixed monthly fee. The power supplier would essentially sell call options to the electricity retailer.

[nawitus]

By selling an insurance.

[zbrozek]

There's another post that used a term I'm going to appropriate for other conversations: homo economicus. We aren't that species. We don't have perfect information. We don't have infinite capacity or attention span to continuously micro-optimize everything.

It's why people buy products and services rather than vertically integrate everything in their lives. I don't want to live Texan Power Simulator any more than I want to be mining my own bauxite or replacing my driveway. Buying a product or service is granting the supplier a profit in exchange for them worrying about and executing the business. But you don't buy power any more. You buy access to a dynamic marketplace in which you probably didn't really want to participate.

What if there were real time pricing per byte coming down from your ISP and you had to sit and stare at your screen waiting for an affordable moment to check your email? Or what if you had to stop mid-shower to avoid spending five figures to rinse the soap off? I can't imagine being happy in those cases, I don't know why I should be happy about it for electricity.

[twoodfin]

I can't speak for Texas, but in many states a contract that allowed a utility provider to shut off service without adequate notification and other paperwork would be illegal.

You're on to an idea that the article doesn't cover: If you want consumers to constrain their utilization during periods of high demand without using price shifts, you might require they install suitably "smart" thermostats and appliances along with their smart meter. These could allow the utility to forcibly curtail power use without rolling blackouts. Some utilities already offer a softer version of this, with your Nest offering to tweak your schedule to marginally lower your bill.

Of course that kind of invasive control would likely not go over much better than $16,000 power bills.

[xoa]

It's an avenue that should be pursued if a state truly wants to have market-based pricing. For that to work there definitely needs to be transparency and ways for customers to easily automatically adjust in response to pricing signals. Though it could be pricy, there is plenty of promising tech approaches and it could definitely be part of an overall more efficient grid.

For example, Tesla Powerwalls (disclaimer: I've got a few) already allow custom time-based controls precisely for the purpose of saving money when on a utility plan that is split into peak/shoulder/off-peak pricing. That's one of the ways they can offer some direct financial return (benefits from generator replacement and on-site production aside). That's not granular enough or automated enough to react to a situation like this one, but on the face of it doesn't seem like any reason it couldn't be. If Tesla had an API that someone like Griddy could talk to, an interface in the app for something like "price-based control" seems like it'd be doable and an interesting value-add and a relatively low lift. Powerwalls already have remote control functionality for grid-operator/customer deals. And it'd give a lot more buffer.

However those of course are $6.5k a pop right now. Long term it might be more fruitful for many people to lean on future electric vehicles for this. Those have humongous batteries and alternate ROI so a lot of people may ultimately have them anyway, vs being a dedicated expense. Hopefully the next decade, along with more fundamental grid investment period, will also see the natural spread of more and smarter buffering options.

[curryst]

They can always pull the main at the breaker.

Unfortunately, that's a terrible option too. The cold is survivable with some gear, but your pipes will freeze and burst unless you drain them (which I have no idea how to do, if it can be done).

We also had several deaths due to people using gas heaters indoors. I think it releases carbon monoxide? Not entirely sure, but those outdoor heaters are meant to be outdoors.

[londons_explore]

Laws generally prevent this (generally a customer's supply can only be cut off with a long and precise legal procedure).

It's possible it might be doable with a user override.

[Spivak]

I think you have this backwards. This isn't the power company shutting off your power. This is telling your agent (in this case Griddy) to stop buying power under some conditions that you define.

[londons_explore]

I understand... But in the eyes of the law, Griddy is your power company, and their equipment shutting off your supply might break a lot of laws about disconnecting people without giving the requisite notice, legal procedure, etc.

Where do you draw the line? "Griddy, please turn my power off if the price goes above $1/kwh"... "Griddy, please turn the power off if I forget to pay the bill.", "Griddy, I'll take a $10/month discount if the power gets turned off when my bill is paid late?", "Griddy, I want to use non-ripoff plan, so I'm happy for you to turn my power off the minute I pay late".

See how it isn't really feasible to stop power companies forcibly illegally disconnecting debtors if you allow a debtor to agree to be disconnected voluntarily?

[nybble41]

If the property owner has a button to override the cut-off and turn the power back on then that should satisfy any legal requirements related to unilateral disconnection of power. The disconnect should happen on the customer's side anyway. The power company just needs to provide accurate information about the current price in a form that can be used by an automated switch. Important circuits could be placed on a separate panel with a higher cut-off point.

[tshaddox]

My impression is that laws also generally prevent extreme increases in the cost of electricity without a great deal of advanced warning.

[londons_explore]

Adding a 100+ amp contactor and two way communication to every existing meter will add a lot to the cost of the equipment required at a user site.

[robocat]

In New Zealand (and many other countries I believe) there are regulations that prevent disconnection when a household needs power for heating in winter. There are also complexities associated with whether a household has critical medical equipment that has a dependency on electricity, which can’t be safely disconnected.

I think these regulations came into place after people died due to the cold, or died because they needed their oxygen generator and power was cut. Possibly the regulations were proactive.

I worked with a company that built prepay power systems that communicated by modem, and cut the power when the money ran out... except when the regulations (mostly sensible rules) kicked in to prevent harm.

In New Zealand there is also a ripple control system to shed domestic loads during peak demand (mostly hot water cylinders).

[Spivak]

Why do you have to do this on the meter side? Cant your power company shut off your power from their end?

[tshaddox]

No, I suspect power companies cannot generally shut off your power from their end. There's not a separate cable from the power plant to each individual home. There are really big cables that go most of the way from the power plant, then at each neighbhorhood or block they split off into smaller cables for individual homes. That's where the meter for each home is installed, and that's where the power company can turn off your electricity.

Traditionally they sent a technician out to read each meter and turn off the electricity if necessary, but there are newer "smart meters" that communicate your usage to the power company (although I'm not sure if those can also be remotely triggered to turn off your power, I would suspect not).

Where I grew up in a small town in the Midwestern US in the 1990s, the meters were usually installed on an external wall at the back of the house. My part of town had underground power lines (good during thunderstorms, bad during road/building construction) and I suspect the meter was right where the buried cable came into the house. Every month a uniformed person from the power company would walk through everyone's backyards taking the reading from each meter.

Fun fact: most utilities and similar services have historically worked this way. I think the cable television company would just send someone to the cable box on the back of your house and flip switches to enable the channels you were paying for. There was always some kid who claimed to get HBO for free because his older cousin worked for the cable company.

Now that I think about it, I recently got a car that's new enough to have Sirius XM satellite radio built in, and I've been wondering how their access control works. Surely the satellite doesn't beam down everyone's subscription status and make their receiver hardware respect that, right? Is my car using the built-in cell phone to check whether I'm subscribed to the satellite radio? Either way, where are the bootlegged satellite radio receivers?

[InitialLastName]

On the last thing, AIUI from some research (confirmed as plausible by experience with similar systems):

- The stream channels themselves are encrypted or scrambled in a way that is hard to unwind unless you have the keys (keeping non-SiriusXM radios from working)

- Each radio has two important pieces of information: a decryption key from SiriusXM and a UUID (I'd guess 64bit, as that's a pretty standard size for hardware-baked-in UUIDs. It might be 128bit instead). You can look up the UUID for your radio. Both of those things, by the way, are bog-standard now in consumer embedded systems exactly because they help prevent bootlegging.

- Channel 0 is an ID channel that constantly streams out a list of valid UUIDs and other configuration data. An un-activated radio can only tune that channel. When it sees its own ID, it enables the rest of the channels.

Quick sanity check: Assuming they have 40 million subscribers and can pass UUIDs at roughly audio rate (to make the math easy, 16-bit, 50kHz), that makes it about an hour to sync all the users. That can probably be watched by your radio in the background, so it's only an issue for initial activation.

[londons_explore]

This may be the way SirusXM works, but it is far from optimal. The best scheme is to give the radios simple sequential (or near sequential) id's, and have the station transmit a bitmap of which id's are enabled/disabled. Then it's one bit per subscriber, and can be transmitted in a few seconds. That bitmap is authenticated by a public key stored in the radio. You might want to run length encode the bitmap if you assume that in 30 years there might still be a handful of ancient radios still alive you wish to service.

Satellite bandwidth is expensive... Activation time is annoying for customers... The above scheme saves either (or both).

[tshaddox]

Just a random thought regarding activation: they could also have a channel broadcasting all new activations, so that you could put your radio into an activation mode while you're finalizing your subscription. Or they could give you an activation code that you could enter manually somehow (it could just be a simple message signed with Sirius' private key).

[InitialLastName]

Yeah, TBH I just assumed it was a unique ID baked into hardware because sequential IDs are a pain to manage, but your idea would be more efficient in the base case. As far as I can tell they also transmit things like channel-specific activations, but the sequential concept still works if that is a bitmap.

[tshaddox]

Yeah, they definitely must do decryption on the device, which means they must have some tamper-proof chip that has never been broken (as far as I can tell, there's no leaked decryption key). That's actually pretty surprising to me.

[InitialLastName]

Well, now I've got to get a radio and have a look.

Looking at teardowns of the current Onyx radio [0], the NXP LPC4078FET180 has both a unique ID and some mechanisms to make it very difficult to read the programmed code externally. One option would be to store the key there, and use that mcu to run all the audio decryption, processing, device activation, and protocol updates (under the control of the TMX570 running the UI etc).

[0] https://fccid.io/RS2SXPL1/Internal-Photos/Onyx-Plus-Internal...

[tehwebguy]

Plenty of power companies can stop power remotely and I would assume the ones with smart meters are at the top of that list.

[wmf]

The same equipment would be required regardless of what end it's on. The pole transformer feeding your house and your neighbor's house is basically passive AFAIK; it's not remotely controllable.

[beojan]

If they could do that, they could also install the meter on their end.

[dreamcompiler]

They could if every house had a dedicated wire to the generator and there was a massive bank of switches in a giant building next to the generator that controlled power to every house. But no grid on Earth works that way.

[everybodyknows]

There’s a less drastic compromise: Power company sends a text one day ahead of expected stress, with news that tomorrow’s price will be 3x normal. Enough to focus customer attention, but without threat of financial ruin.

SDG&E, in California, offers such a plan (layered on top of conventional TOU terms).

[Faaak]

France's Linky has a built-in relay that the TSO can use to shed some power in the event of an emergency. I suppose that it could be used by a novel energy supplier to pay less in power reserve and they could shut off willing consumers in the event of a near blackout.

[pxeboot]

On the other hand, a lot of people would have been happy to have a 5 figure electric bill instead of having their pipes freeze from an involuntary blackout.

[spamizbad]

For thousands in Texas they're getting both.

[filoleg]

Which is why the parent comment says "can have a limit", not "must require a limit".

That way, those who would rather get through a blackout without paying insane bills can have an option to do so, while those who care about their pipes freezing can pay to keep the electricity.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I still think this is totally unfeasible. Then all the news stories would just be "Fine print in electric contract shut off power for many, now facing thousands in water damage bills."

[filoleg]

Totally agreed with you, it is probably completely unfeasible. I was just assuming we were talking about this in terms of ideal wants.

[HeavenFox]

...except the latter will (likely) be covered by insurance, whereas you are on your own for the former.